Tweak Your ClearType Font Settings

Yes it’s quick, but it doesn’t support Aero in Vista. And then there is the font rendering. WTF? Chris Pirillo tells me on Flickr that it’s something to do with settings so I’ll have to play with it some more but the first impression Windows users are going to get is terrible: fuzzy, hard to read fonts.

Apple generally believes that the goal of the algorithm should be to preserve the design of the typeface as much as possible, even at the cost of a little bit of blurriness. Microsoft generally believes that the shape of each letter should be hammered into pixel boundaries to prevent blur and improve readability, even at the cost of not being true to the typeface.

I actually found the text in Safari to be far more to my liking than what I’ve grown accustomed to in Firefox / Maxthon. Maybe I belong on OS X, after all? Until then, I wanted everyone (Duncan!) to realize that you can easily modify Windows ClearType thickness – as no monitor renders text alike. Try either ClearTweak or Microsoft’s own online ClearType Tuner. Find the setting your eyes most appreciate!